Drifting
by Youkomon
Summary: <html><head></head>You are here, in the cosmos, stuck between nothing and everything. But so is the girl who was once a god.</html>


Post-Fate/EXTRA, at least, in regards to the first game...and well, it kinda ignores the Caster ending after the events of CCC.

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><p>You can imagine it, falling through both space and time, imagine the darkness that folds you up inside, twisting your stomach as your fall gobbles up stars and makes them trail into galaxies, a green glow to their countenance that they wear like a dress. But you can't imagine the pain, of a human mind melded like data and dissolving, fizzing out into nothing. You thought it would be painless like water lapping away at you, swallowing you up inch by inch. Or, if there was any pain, it would be a bleak sting, something that rushed up from head to toe to engulf you. Not a sword-thrust through the mind, not a burn to the brain, not a jelly-fish sting to the psyche. No, this is a spider bite to your soul, venom pouring inside.<p>

You stretch, and see...and see...

'Let me in, Hakuno,' Tamamo whispers, her claws wrapped in eternity, 'let me in.'

You weep, glibber, pull away. Suns burn behind your eyes, worlds unfold where you are both living and dead, worlds where you, the first you, is torn away by fire and a stray timber beam, quick and easy so that no data ghost can ever be born. Worlds where you play in sunlight, let it dapple your face as you walk outside the gardens of an academy, a smiling teacher in red awaiting your questions next to a patio table glaring out in white. Worlds where your gender shifts, changes and you float through cyberspace next to the ready steps of a dazzling empress who refuses to be afraid.

But now you are afraid, terribly afraid. It's too much, too much, all these worlds and lives you could have lived when you barely had the courage to live the one.

'And you made it count, master, did you not? I was there beside you and I am here with you again!' Tamamo floats in swirls of gold, ghostly images flickering beside her tail, all of them the floating phantom strokes of duplicates. Her hand extends, larger than the sun, the one you have never felt bathe you face, but just, may be, you think, twice as hot. 'Fight on, master!'

It takes years. But your fingers touch.

And you are - a swirl, a discontented feeling, a blur like curiosity settling on the steps of your altar, confusion at insects who run and scatter in bipedal forms, who stroke each other's souls with words though they can never see, never touch, such jewelled things, not until death peels away the flesh.

And you are – a joker, a prankster, stealing imagery from Anubis, watching the frolicking merriments of foxes and their cubs, their grace so catlike that you wish to leave the jackal ears and the tail behind, but choose, instead to rename them.

And you are – walking, through dust and mud with no memory of the stars, the taint of battle on your lips as the foxes dance and sing, refusing to give you the words you need to hear, and even if they could, it would be far cry from the words of your love, the one who sits on a throne and demands your death through his absence.

You are -

'So small,' Tamamo whispers, 'so lovely. My dear master. My beloved soul. All mine. Can I have it?' Her voice bleeds into the stars as she rubs your hands, soothing them with the dead tails of planets as their rocks blister out into unnamed asteroid belts. 'So quaint,' she breathes, 'so tiny.'

And it is like the sun comes home to alight upon your skin at the touch of her mouth, so close to your own. Space breathes between you, inside of you, making your soul its home.

'So small, like a flicker of a courtesan's fan. I want to keep you, even if my claim on you is presumptuous.'

Her words do not hurt the way they might have done once. And you open your mouth further, like the fan image that alights on her speech, trying to swallow everything down, words, breath, atoms, all. Everything until you are dust.

'My dear master, death has never been anything to sneer at. Do you see?'

You shake your head, mute at everything, the beauty and the sheer savage destruction it wrecks against your human mind.

'That will change. And you will make it! There is no other as awesome as my master, after all!'

Light, speed, her fingers, her face, all work like forces against you, on your cheek and against your lips. You spread your fingers, see them blacken then blue, ethereal in the dark.

'I'm dead? It's over?' You test the words out to make them real, just to prove that you can.

Tamamo hugs you fiercely a jealous serpent in her love by the way that it boils against your chest, a tight restriction that burns like a supernova. And, if you were alive, it would leave you gasping.

'You won. Of course, there was no doubt in my mind that you ever wouldn't. But over? Master, master...'

You can hear the steadiness in her voice, a left-over remnant perhaps, from when she was a god with calmness, or perhaps just apathy, coiled through her vastness, back before she ever even felt desire tugging her towards humanity. And perhaps of course, this is why you are here now, why she serves as an anchor against eternity. A counterbalance, of sorts.

'You fed my heart.' She gives your cheek one last grave stroke. Then pinches it, a bright smile washing over her face. 'Now it's time to make yours warm and full! Hehe...'

And just like that the perkiness is back, snapping out with all the fluidity of an elastic band.

The stars still burn and space spreads out before you, a buffet to your dreams. You are neither awake nor asleep but dead or something close to it. And the leftovers from a god humanity dragged down holds you close, whispers reassurances in your ears that form constellations along their curves.

'What do you wish to feast upon first, Hakuno?'

The sky and everything contained within, is now, for the first time, very much the limit.


End file.
